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Research Article

Human flourishing and religious liberty: Evidence from over 150 countries

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

• Christos Andreas Makridis

• Published: October 1, 2020
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

This paper studies the spatial and time series patterns of religious liberty across countries and estimates its effect on measures of human flourishing. First, while there are significant cross-country differences in religious liberty, it has declined in the past decade across countries, particularly among countries that rank higher in economic freedom. Second, countries with greater religious liberty nonetheless exhibit greater levels of economic freedom, particularly property rights. Third, using micro-data across over 150 countries in the world between 2006 and 2018, increases in religious freedom are associated with robust increases in measures of human flourishing even after controlling for time-invariant characteristics across space and time and a wide array of time-varying country-specific factors, such as economic activity and institutional quality. Fourth, these improvements in well-being are primarily driven by improvements in civil liberties, such as women empowerment and freedom of expression.

Citation: Makridis CA (2020) Human flourishing and religious liberty: Evidence from over 150 countries. PLoS ONE 15(10): e0239983. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983

Editor: Yanyan Gao, Southeast University, CHINA

Received: April 15, 2020; Accepted: September 16, 2020; Published: October 1, 2020

This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.

Data Availability: The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from Gallup (contact Kris Hodgins at [email protected] ) for researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data. Interested researchers can replicate the study findings in their entirety by directly obtaining the data from Gallup Organization and following the protocol in the Methods section. While author CAM’s role as a senior adviser at Gallup allows for access to the World Poll for free, other researchers can obtain a license to work with the data. Moreover, researchers at a handful of universities may already have free access to the data.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The United States was founded by individuals fleeing religious persecution from the Anglican church in Great Britain. These individuals who initially settled the country, and eventually the Founding Fathers, not only did not distinguish between civil and religious liberty, but also viewed religious liberty as humanity’s most fundamental form of freedom [ 1 ].

While there is a large literature on the effects of regulation and property rights on economic and social development, there is a much smaller literature on the role of religious liberty. This comes at a time when nearly 80% of people throughout the world live in a “religiously restricted environment,” prompting the Department of State, and the United States at large, to champion religious liberty as a national and economic security priority [ 2 ].

Descriptive evidence suggests that countries with greater religious liberty have greater levels of economic development [ 3 , 4 ]. However, whether such a relationship is causal is a challenging question because of two confounding forces that move in opposite directions. On one hand, countries with greater religious liberty may also have better economic institutions, like property rights, that promote economic development and human flourishing [ 5 – 7 ]. On the other hand, religious affiliation is negatively associated with economic growth [ 8 , 9 ]. The primary contribution of this paper is to explore whether such a plausibly causal relationship between religious liberty and well-being exists. Fig 1 provides suggestive evidence that the answer is yes: the countries that experienced the greatest growth in religious liberty between 2006 and 2018 also experienced the greatest growth in human flourishing, which we define and investigate in the paper ahead.

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Sources: Gallup World Poll, Varieties of Democracy, 2006-2018. The figure reports the population-weighted association between the 2006-2018 growth rate in religious liberty and the share of individuals who report that they are thriving. This measure of thriving is generated based on having a response of 7 or higher on a 10-point scale about current life satisfaction and having a response of 8 or higher on a similar 10-point scale about expected future life satisfaction in 5 years (see Table 1 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.g001

The first part of the paper documents two stylized facts about religious liberty and its correlation with various measures of economic development using the Gallup World Poll, the Varieties of Democracy (“V-Dem”), and the World Bank. First, the average (median) country has experienced an 8% (13%) decline in religious liberty between 2006 and 2018. These declines are, perhaps counterintuitively, concentrated among countries with greater economic freedom, especially those with stronger property rights. Second, a strong positive correlation between religious liberty and economic freedom nonetheless exists in the cross-section, which is related with a large literature on the role of institutions for economic development [ 7 , 10 ]. These results are also consistent with prior literature that religious freedom is positively associated with almost all of the pillars of global competitiveness in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index [ 3 , 4 ], suggesting that religious liberty is a prerequisite, or at least a complementary factor, for other forms of economic development and economic freedom.

The second part of the paper quantifies a plausibly causal effect of religious liberty on human flourishing. Using year-to-year variation in changes in the social and governmental regulation of religion between 2006 and 2018, a standard deviation (sd) increase in religious liberty is associated with a 0.03 percentage point (pp) rise in the probability that an individual is thriving and a 0.08sd rise in individual well-being. These improvements in human flourishing are concentrated among religious minorities. To put these estimates in perspective, since only 26% of the sample reports that they are thriving, the marginal effect of a standard deviation change in religious liberty—equivalent to transforming a country like Russia into the United States—amounts to approximately an 11% increase in the share of thriving individuals.

The baseline specification controls for not only country and year fixed effects, but also a wide array of demographic and country-specific time-varying factors, such as economic growth and institutional quality. While these controls help mitigate the concern that there are unobserved shocks affecting human flourishing that are also correlated with religious liberty, they may fail to control for the potential negative association between economic growth and religious affiliation that has been suggested in prior literature. As an alternative identification strategy, I exploit plausibly exogenous historical variation in the exposure of missionaries across countries [ 11 ]. The identifying assumption is that exposure to missionaries prior to 1923 increases the probability that a country has more egalitarian norms governing religious liberty today, but does not affect human flourishing through other channels besides religious liberty. The resulting estimates are larger than the least squares estimates, suggesting that the baseline provides a lower bound.

These results could be consistent with at least one of three different mechanisms. First, religious liberty could lead to an increase in well-being through its effects on democratic governance and freedom of expression since individuals are empowered to believe what they want and participate in the civics process. Second, by placing an emphasis on religious pluralism and competition among different worldview for the pursuit of truth, it could lead to greater educational attainment. Third, it could reduce the probability of entering into civil war and other forms of armed conflict. Using additional data on these country-specific outcomes between 1995 and 2018, the results are primarily consistent with the first mechanism: increases in religious liberty affect well-being through its effects on democratic governance and freedom. For example, there are economically and statistically strong positive associations between religious liberty and civil liberties, women empowerment, access to justice, and freedom of expression, as well as some negative associations with public and political corruption even after controlling for time-varying measures of economic performance and both country and year fixed effects. These results are consistent with contributions on the complementarity of social capital and democratic institutions [ 12 – 14 ].

This paper contributes to two literatures. The first investigates the role of institutions on economic development [ 15 ]. Although an active debate remains over the exact quantitative effects of institutions on economic development, there is causal evidence documenting the importance of property rights [ 7 ], regulation [ 16 ], and the adverse consequences of colonialism [ 6 , 10 ] for economic development. There is also a large political science literature about the effects of democratic institutions on stability [ 17 ] and economic growth [ 18 ].

However, beyond these empirical investigations of political and economic institutions, there is a much smaller literature about the effects of religious institutions on measures of human flourishing and economic development [ 19 ]. This paper contributes to an ongoing debate about the effects of religious pluralism on religious vitality. Some evidence supports “the supply-side view”—that greater religious pluralism was associated with greater church attendance in the United States [ 20 – 22 ] and across the world [ 23 – 26 ]—a vigorous debate remains over whether the relationship is negative [ 27 – 29 ] or potentially null [ 30 ]. By finding that increases in religious liberty lead to increases in human flourishing, this paper provides new microeconomic evidence consistent with the supply-side view that religious participation and well-being thrive under pluralism.

The second literature investigates the effect of culture (e.g., religious affiliation) and institutions on economic development [ 31 ]. There has been a general recognition that religious practices and beliefs affect economic activity at a microeconomic level [ 32 ], ranging from subjective well being [ 33 ] to criminal activity [ 34 ] and educational attainment [ 35 ]. These theories also have aggregate implications, including whether religious affiliation is associated with economic growth on a panel of countries [ 8 ]. Similarly, motivated by evidence that more religious people tend to be more trusting and more trustworthy [ 36 ], some have found that religious affiliation is negatively associated with attitudes about innovation [ 37 ]. However, causal inference has been challenging [ 38 ].

Using plausibly exogenous fluctuations in the lunar cycle and the resulting hours in a day, one study found a negative association between fasting during Ramadan and economic growth [ 9 ]. While the identification strategy allows for a more causal interpretation than traditional estimates, one limitation is that the identifying variation comes from only small movements in the hours available each day, making it challenging to extrapolate out of sample. Moreover, their analysis is restricted to the set of Muslim adherents across countries. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the economic effects of religious affiliation by focusing more broadly on religious liberty, which is important for protecting against religious persecution [ 39 ]. Moreover, this paper draws on much more comprehensive data that covers over 150 countries annually for over a decade, contrasting with prior studies that have used the World Values Survey (WVS), which covers roughly 50 countries with smaller samples and fewer questions that reflect the concept of human flourishing [ 40 ].

The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 introduces the new data and measurement strategy. Section 3 describes the empirical strategy and presents the main results. Section 4 investigates the mechanisms behind this result. Section 5 concludes.

Data, measurement, and key patterns

Repeated cross-section of well-being (2006-2018).

The primary dataset in this analysis is the World Gallup Poll, which contains surveys from over 150 countries that make up 98% of the world’s population based on randomly selected and nationally representative samples. While these surveys are launched multiple times a year in most countries, all countries have the survey administered at least once, barring severe extenuating circumstances. The baseline empirical specification pools all countries together, but the results are robust to restricting the sample to countries observed at least 11 times, as well as to a fully balanced panel, although the standard errors rise marginally. (The matched data includes responses from 156 countries observed for at least five years between 2006 and 2018 with between 290 and 11,420 respondents within a given year depending on the country. Roughly 80% of countries are observed at least 11 times and 47% are observed all 13 years.) Survey questions are designed to cover a wide array of key indicators, including law & order, food & shelter, job creation, migration, financial well-being, personal health, civic engagement, and evaluative well-being.

Each questionnaire is translated into the major conversational language in each country. To maximize accessibility, two approaches can be used. The first approach involves completing two independent translations with an independent third party who also has some knowledge of survey research methods who adjudicates the differences. A professional translator will subsequently translate the final version back into the source language. The second approach involves using a translator to translate the survey into the target language and an independent translator back into the source language. An independent third party with knowledge of survey methods will review and make any final translation modifications. Interviewers for each country are instructed to follow the script and not to deviate from the translated language.

Gallup selects quality vendors with experience in survey design and implementation with in-depth training sessions with local field staff prior to the start of data collection. Gallup also follows ESOMAR standards for quality control. A supervisor accompanies each interviewer for one full interview within the first two days of interviewing and the supervisor accompanies interviews on a minimum of 5% of subsequent interviews. Interviewers re-contact a minimum of 15% of households to ensure correct execution of random route procedures and within-household selection. Telephone surveys are used in countries where coverage represents at least 80% of the population. Information that is gathered is also standardized so that it is comparable across countries, e.g., education (elementary, secondary, and tertiary) and income.

Table 1 enumerates the questions used in the survey design to measure well-being. Two main measures are employed. The first is an indicator for whether an individual reports that they are thriving. As Table 1 describes, individuals are surveyed on a scale of 0 to 10 about their current and expected future (in five years) life satisfaction. If an individual reports at least a 7/10 on current life satisfaction and at least an 8/10 on expected future life satisfaction, they are classified as thriving. The second conducts a principal component analysis (PCA) over four standard normal measures of subjective well-being: daily experience, optimism, positive experience, and negative experience. The resulting latent index extracts the common signal among each of these four measures, which is more likely to reflect the broader concept of human flourishing [ 40 ]. Nonetheless, the results are statistically indistinguishable from those obtained from a simpler heuristic, like the unweighted average across each of the four sub-indices, is used.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.t001

Both these measures are comparable with the measures of happiness from the World Values Survey. For example, some use an indicator for whether an individual reports “quite happy” or “very happy” in response to the question: “Taking all things together, would you say you are: not at all happy, not very happy, quite happy, very happy?” [ 9 ]. Similarly, some also create an indicator for whether the respondent reports a value above 5 in response to the question “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days,” which is asked on a numerical 10-point scale. In this sense, while the Gallup data provides several comparable measures to the WVS, it also provides a wide range of additional responses about institutions, human flourishing, and religious affiliation.

Time-varying measure of religious liberty and institutions

While there are several sources of information on religious liberty available, like the Pew Research Center’s measurement of government restrictions and social hostilities [ 41 ], the Varieties of Democracy (“V-Dem”) has emerged as the first attempt to measure a wide array of cross-country institutional characteristics on a consistent and continuous basis year-after-year using a combination of state-of-the-art statistical methods and expert elicitation [ 42 ].

Unlike standard approaches that produce an index based on the response to specific questions, V-Dem treats each measure as an inherently latent variable that (approximately five) expert raters only observe manifestations of in a noise environment. This approach, known as differential item functioning (DIF), perceive latent regime characteristics that map into ordinal scales in V-Dem. Recognizing that each expert will interpret questions differently, V-Dem allows for the possibility that raters apply different thresholds when they map their perceptions of latent traits into ordinal ratings for each of the different measures. As long as the errors in each of these measurements are uncorrelated with each other, the covariance across them will identify the latent distribution.

One concern with this approach is that experts may vary in non-random ways across countries. For example, if countries with lower productivity attract lower quality experts, then the ratings for some countries might be lower than others and correlate in unobserved ways with human flourishing. However, because V-Dem allows raters to apply different thresholds when they map their perceptions into the ordinal scales, V-Dem produces a standard deviation of each measurement, which can serve as a control for potential classical or non-classical measurement error in the index of interest.

This paper focuses on the measurement of one specific index from V-Dem: religious liberty. The survey question on religious liberty asks about “the extent to which individuals and groups have the right to choose a religion, change their religion, and practice that religion in private or in public as well as to proselytize peacefully without being subject to restrictions by public authorities.” Table 2 documents the ordinal scale that range between zero and four, together with the corresponding responses from the experts who are being surveyed.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.t002

This approach is a form of item response theory (IRT), which provides ways for dealing with disagreement among experts over inherently subjective assessments. Although they are much more complex than simple heuristics, like an average across survey respondents, they exhibit much better performance [ 43 ]. One reason is the ability to control and explicitly model survey respondent reliability. Because experts in the V-Dem survey answer multiple questions, multiple answers that deviate from the norm will produce a lower reliability, thereby generating lower weights in the inclusion of the respondent’s answer in the overall score.

To understand how these data compare with more conventional sources that are only available in the cross-section (i.e., not panel), Fig 2 plots the V-Dem measure of religious liberty with the two indices of government restrictions and social hostilities from the Pew Research Center. These variables are presented in their standard normal form with a mean of zero and standard deviation of one. Not surprisingly, there are strong negative correlations between the two, particularly between government restrictions and V-Dem (with a correlation of -0.77). The fact that the V-Dem data is negatively correlated with both of these indices suggests that it is capturing features of both formal government policies that restrict religion and informal social hostilities that create pressure against religious freedom and pluralism.

Sources: Varieties of Democracy (“V-Dem”) Pew Research Center, 2007, 2016, 2017. The figures plots the standardized z-scores of religious liberty from V-DEM and government restrictions and social hostilities from the Pew Research Center.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.g002

World bank panel of country characteristics

The main supplementary data is from the World Bank, which contains time-varying country economic and demographic characteristics, such as GDP and employment growth, and the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom, which contains time-varying country measures of institutional quality. Comparable with the Fraser Institute, these variables are important for not only controlling covariates in the main regression, but also determining mediating influences [ 44 ]. For example, changes in economic growth are often precipitated by changes in economic freedom [ 45 ].

Does religious liberty simply proxy for other, more traditional measures of institutional quality? While the next section will explore some bivariate correlations, Table 3 begins by estimating cross-sectional regressions of religious liberty on various dimensions of economic freedom (as z -scores), controlling for a few time-varying country characteristics, such as GDP growth and population. Here, overall economic freedom consists of four categories: rule of law (property rights, government integrity, judicial effectiveness), government size (government spending, tax burden, fiscal health), regulatory efficiency (business freedom, labor freedom, monetary freedom), and open markets (trade freedom, investment freedom, and financial freedom).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.t003

There is a strong positive association for each of these measures: a 1sd rise in overall economic freedom is associated with a 0.24sd rise in religious liberty, conditional on controls. Interestingly, property rights are most closely correlated with religious liberty. In fact, it is the only characteristic of economic freedom that systematically enters in a statistically and economically significant way across specifications, particularly in column 6 where each dimension is included as a control. These results suggest that, while economic freedom is correlated with religious liberty, the latter is detecting a fundamentally different dimension of institutional quality, consistent with existing cross-sectional evidence [ 4 ].

While religious liberty is correlated with other measures of institutional quality, it is capturing systematically different features across countries. Using an average between 1995 and 2018, Fig 3 plots population-weighted correlations between standardized religious liberty and four measures of institutions: property rights, government integrity, business freedom, and labor freedom. The strongest correlation is between religious liberty and property rights, which is 0.67 (Panel A), suggesting that areas with stronger ownership over property rights also exhibit greater religious liberty. The correlations with government integrity and business freedom are 0.43 and 0.51 (Panels B and C), respectively. (The corresponding population-weighted correlation with the logarithm of per capita GDP is 0.30.) These results are consistent with prior literature that religious freedom is positively associated with almost all of the pillars of global competitiveness in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index [ 3 , 4 ].

Sources: Varieties of Democracy and Heritage Foundation. The figure plots the population-weighted relationship between standard normal measures of religious liberty and institutional quality measured with property rights and labor market freedom. These indices are standardized based on their 1995-2018 average.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.g003

Moreover, the V-Dem data contains significant within-country variation. To provide a characterization of this variation, Fig 4 plots the distribution of growth rates in religious liberty indices between 2006 and 2018 across countries. However, there has been a large decline in religious liberty over these years—a mean of 8.1% and a median of 13.25%. Importantly, however, the fact that there is such wide variation (standard deviation = 0.57) is important for the identification strategy, which exploits year-to-year changes in religious liberty and human flourishing.

Sources: Varieties of Democracy. The figure plots the distribution of growth rates in the religious liberty index between 2006 and 2018 across countries. The sample is trimmed so that there is no observation with a growth rate above 300% or below -300%.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.g004

What countries have experienced greater declines in religious liberty over others? Perhaps surprisingly, more developed countries have. Fig 5 investigates the relationship between growth in religious liberty over 2006-2018 and two measures of economic development: the strength of property rights and the logarithm of GDP per capita. While growth in religious liberty exhibits a -0.18 correlation with the strength of property rights, it has a 0.13 correlation with logged GDP per capita. This suggests that, while religious liberty generally expanded in more economically developed countries, it still declined in many countries that tend to rank higher in property rights and the rule of law. For example, Denmark exhibited a 55.6% decline, France a 38.9% decline, the United States a 35.1% decline, and the United Kingdom a 24.9% decline.

Sources: Varieties of Democracy, World Bank, and Heritage Foundation. The figure plots the population-weighted relationship between the growth in religious liberty between 2006 and 2018 and an index of property rights and GDP per capita (averaged over 2006 and 2018 levels.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.g005

Methodological approach

The inclusion of country and year effects is important for identification since countries vary in remarkably different ways that are often difficult to measure, namely the role of institutions on economic development [ 6 , 10 , 18 ]. In addition to individual demographic characteristics that control for differences in well-being (gender, age, number of children, and education fixed effects), the inclusion of time-varying country-specific factors, such as GDP growth and industry composition, purges variation in economic activity that could coincide with both political liberalization and human flourishing. For example, if GDP growth increases, then subjective well-being will rise at the same time that political leadership could feel less compelled to regulate religion. Similarly, differences in the agricultural and services employment shares is correlated with a country’s stage of economic development. Moreover, to address the possibility that political reforms coincide with economic reforms, indices of property rights, business freedom, and labor freedom from the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom are included as controls.

The identifying assumption in Eq 1 is that unobserved shocks to individual well-being are uncorrelated with changes in religious liberty, conditional on various time-varying individual and country characteristics. While prior literature has often taken government and social regulations over religion as exogenous (e.g., [ 8 ]), Eq 1 may still produce biased estimates for two reasons. First, to the extent there are other unobserved determinants of well-being that are not captured by the country-specific controls, then estimates of γ are upwards biased. Second, given prior research that has found a negative association between measures of religious affiliation and economic growth [ 8 , 9 ], increases in religious liberty could lead to increases in religious affiliation, producing downwards bias on γ . These combined forces imply that the naive estimates may be either upwards or downwards biased depending on the strength of one force over another.

Although the country-specific controls are fairly detailed, I also pursue an alternative identification strategy that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in historical exposure to missionaries [ 11 , 48 , 49 ]. In particular, Robert Woodberry constructed a dataset with 143 countries, containing information on the number of Christian missionaries through the 1925 World Missionary Atlas [ 11 ]. Drawing on his measure of missionary exposure, measured through both Protestant and Catholic missionaries per 10,000 individuals in 1923, I find a strong relationship between them and religious liberty averaged between 2006 and 2018, producing correlations of 0.27 and 0.33, respectively. These results suggest that countries with greater exposure to missionaries (either Protestant or Catholic) prior to 1923 have greater contemporaneous levels of religious liberty.

Importantly, these two variables leverage heterogeneity in the exposure of a country to different types and quantities of missionaries (Protestant and Catholic), which may have had different effects on a country’s development of institutions. This is reasonable given that missionaries, especially “conversionary Protestants” (CPs), “had a unique role in spreading mass education, printing, civil society, and other factors that scholars argue fostered democracy” [ 11 ]. In particular, rather than building on exploitation from colonial development [ 6 ], missionaries publicly advocated for changes in colonial policy, fought for the transfer of ideas, and helped indigenous peoples organize anti-colonial movements [ 50 , 51 ]. These findings build on a larger literature linking Protestantism and modern representative democracy [ 52 – 54 ].

One reason that could motivate the plausible exogeneity of missionary exposure could stem from the fact that information prior to 1923 diffused much slower than today’s news because of the internet. Because conditions across different countries were not common knowledge, it is unlikely that missionaries were optimizing what country to go to in a way that is correlated with future conditions. Moreover, since countries that received more missionaries also required greater support, selection effects could even produce downwards bias since the instrument would predict lower levels of religious liberty due to persistence in negative selection effects. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that missionaries might have gone towards countries that had better conditions, so the IV specifications presented later control for a handful of geographic, climate, and even health and mortality conditions [ 55 ].

On the other hand, a separate threat to the identifying assumption is that exposure to missionaries affects contemporaneous well-being through many other channels—not just religious liberty. That is, if exposure leads to more pluralistic and democratic institutions that are also more conducive to growth, better at educating citizens, and/or reduce the propensity for conflict, then the instrument might overestimate the causal effect on religious liberty on well-being. I address this concern by controlling for various factors, such as economic growth and industrial composition, helping isolate the variation that stems from the effect of exposure on religious pluralism.

Main results and robustness

Table 4 documents the results associated with the baseline specification. Columns 1 and 9 begin by presenting the raw unconditional correlation: a 1sd rise in religious liberty is associated with a 0.04pp increase in the probability that an individual is thriving, but no economically or statistically significant increase in overall well-being. As discussed before, however, the unconditional correlation between religious liberty and human flourishing, particularly for this broader measure, reflects two confounding forces: countries with greater religious liberty also exhibit greater economic freedoms ( Fig 3 ), but greater religious liberty could increase religious affiliation that counteracts economic growth. The subsequent two columns introduce individual demographic and country-specific controls, but the point estimates remain largely indistinguishable from the unconditional correlation reported earlier.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.t004

While males report 0.05sd higher levels of well-being, they are 1-2% less likely to report that they are thriving. Individuals who are married are more likely to be thriving have higher well-being, but older individuals and those with families report slightly lower levels. Turning towards education, since the omitted group is those with over a secondary education, the fact that the point estimates on elementary and secondary education are negative suggests that there is a strong association between educational attainment and human flourishing. Turning towards the country-specific controls that begin to appear in columns 3 and 11, there is a positive association between real GDP growth and human flourishing, as is real GDP per capita (not reported) consistent with evidence on the Easterlin hypothesis [ 56 ]. Larger countries (at least in population) tend to have lower levels of human flourishing, which could reflect greater competition for scarce resources. Moreover, the agricultural employment share is negatively correlated with human flourishing, which reflects the fact that these countries are at an earlier stage of the development process [ 57 ].

Columns 4 and 12 present the baseline specification that contains the standard controls and fixed effects on both country and year, suggesting that 1sd rise in religious liberty is associated with a 0.03pp rise in the probability that an individual is thriving and a 0.08sd rise in individual well-being. The marginal effect of a standard deviation on an indicator for whether an individual is thriving declines to 0.022 (p-value = 0.064) when the sample is restricted to a fully balanced set of countries. Approximately 47% of countries are observed each year from 2006 to 2018, but nearly 81% are observed at least 11 times over those years. Moreover, the number of times that a country is observed is only weakly correlated ( ρ = 0.10) with the outcome variable, suggesting that measurement error is unlikely to generate bias.

Do these point estimates reflect potential upwards bias emerging from unobserved heterogeneity in the quality of institutions? To investigate the role of unobserved heterogeneity, columns 5-8 and 13-16 sequentially introduce measures of property rights, business freedom, and labor freedom as additional controls. However, these variables tend to produce statistically insignificant estimates, suggesting that they are not culprits behind potential omitted variables bias. Moreover, the fact that the point estimates on religious liberty are not statistically different from the baseline suggests that any unobserved determinants of human flourishing are likely only weakly correlated with religious liberty [ 58 ].

Are these gains in individual well-being the result of the indirect effect of the potentially beneficial effects of religious liberty on economic development? While various time-varying controls were included in the earlier results, I now investigate regressions of economic activity on religious liberty under similar specifications. Table 5 documents these results. Both the OLS and FE estimates are presented for completeness, but the FE estimates are preferred because they remove potentially problematic time-varying unobserved heterogeneity.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.t005

There is a positive, but statistically insignificant at conventional levels, effect of improvements in religious liberty on real GDP and GDP growth. This could be a result of endogeneity emerging from the potentially negative contemporaneous effect of religious affiliation on productivity, but it nonetheless suggests that the results from Table 4 are unlikely plagued by these concerns about omitted variables. There is also a positive, and statistically significant at the 10% level, effect of religious liberty on school enrollment in secondary education as a share of gross enrollment. This is consistent with the view that increased religious pluralism encourages greater pursuit of educational attainment and creativity, but no causal interpretation can be ascribed to these results.

However, these fixed effects specifications could still produce downwards biased estimates of the causal effect of religious liberty on human flourishing because of the negative association between religious affiliation and economic growth [ 8 , 9 ]. To address these concerns, I now exploit plausibly exogenous historical variation in exposure to missionaries prior to 1923. The identifying assumption is that, after controlling for contemporaneous country-specific factors, such as economic activity and institutional quality, the effect of missionaries on human flourishing operates only through its effects on improvements in religious liberty.

The exclusion restriction could be violated in several ways. If missionary exposure affects economic development through other channels, then we might overestimate the effects of missions on human flourishing. To address the possibility, I control for geographic characteristics (whether the country is an island, whether it is landlocked, and latitude), average temperature in the hottest and coldest month, and whether there was a malaria epidemic in the country, on top of the standard individual and contemporaneous country controls that are in the baseline specification [ 11 ]. These controls also address the possibility that certain countries might have had better transportation networks or a lower incidence of disease, which could affect the attractiveness or ability for missionaries to go to the country in the first place [ 55 ]. Subsequent work has explored answers to these concerns about omitted variables in much greater detail [ 59 ].

Turning towards these IV results, I find that a 1sd rise in religious liberty is associated with a 0.084 percentage point ( p -value = 0.002) rise in the probability that an individual reports that they are thriving, which is larger than the marginal effect of 0.018 in the baseline specification. While the F -statistic is only 7, thus below the rule-of-thumb of 10, the marginal effect is nonetheless statistically significant. However, because the instrument is cross-sectional, standard errors are now clustered at the country-by-year level. Moreover, if additional controls on mortality status, life expectancy, urbanization, and population density as of 1500 are added as additional historical controls, the marginal effect declines to 0.023, which is statistically indistinguishable from the 0.018 in the earlier results. In this sense, the IV results provide complementary support that the baseline specification reflects a genuine causal effect.

Understanding the mechanisms

There are at least three mechanisms that could explain the observed positive effects. First, it is possible that religious freedom creates the seeds for democracy by producing a space where self-expression and public discourse is free and open. Empirical evidence suggests that these factors were important for the emergence and continuity of democracy in Europe and North America [ 52 – 54 ]. Although some argue that democracy was developed purely through Enlightenment ideas, countries that developed democracies purely on the basis of Enlightenment ideals were generally not stable [ 60 ] and/or consisted of only the elites [ 61 , 62 ]. For example, there is evidence, particularly among conversionary Protestants, that religious movements and the presence of religious freedom led to the development of newspapers and print media through the printing press, which leveraged public opinion to democratize society and decentralize power from the elites [ 63 ].

Second, another way that religious pluralism could be linked with improvements in well-being is through its effects on educational attainment. For example, much like elites in the nineteenth century resisted educating women and the poor based on the concern that it would lead to instability [ 64 , 65 ], the promotion of religious liberty is driven by the belief that each individual has the option and responsibility of pursuing truth and becoming educated on their terms, rather than by force [ 66 ]. The resulting improvements in educational attainment could have driven improvements in per capita income growth and human flourishing [ 67 ].

Third, religious freedom could mitigate the incidence of conflict and civil strife by promoting greater respect for one another and processes for resolving disputes. For example, many of the non-violent tactics for social reform, such as boycotts and mass petitions, were piloted by religious organizations [ 68 , 69 ]. Conversionary Protestants were especially common organizers behind movements throughout the world, ranging from Great Britain [ 68 , 70 ] to the United States [ 51 ] to India [ 71 , 72 ]. [ 50 ]. At the core of these movements was the belief that all individuals are created equal with the ability and interest to thrive if given the opportunity, countering many of the colonial and class-specific narratives that prevailed. Protestant Christians were particularly likely to enter and positively influence civil society by enacting reforms and promoting peace [ 73 – 76 ]. Moreover, by promoting equality across traditional race and class structures, religious forces were more likely to create and maintain stable democracies and survive potential authoritarian regimes that take over [ 77 ].

To investigate the relative importance of these competing mechanisms, Table 6 considers both standard least squares and fixed effects estimates to capture cross-sectional and within-country differences. Moreover, because these exercises make greater use of the World Bank and V-Dem data, the sample can extend further back to 1995 up to 2018. The sample is fairly balanced with 165 to 168 countries each year. Starting with measures of educational attainment, there is positive association between religious liberty and schooling in the cross-section: a 1sd rise in religious liberty is associated with a 0.03pp and 0.06pp rise in secondary and tertiary school enrollment, but no association with primary school enrollment. Given that the averages are 0.77 and 0.35, respectively, the estimate for tertiary school is economically meaningful: a marginal effect amounts to 17% (= 0.06/.35) of the mean. However, once country and year fixed effects are introduced, these correlations vanish. One interpretation is that the cross-section captures a long-term effect that religious liberty may have on well-being through changes in the education system, whereas the year-to-year variation is capturing more of the short to medium -run impact.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239983.t006

Turning towards measures of corruption as a proxy for democratic governance, there is a strong moderating effect: a 1sd rise in religious liberty is associated with a 0.29sd and 0.32sd decline in political and public corruption, respectively, in the cross-section and a 0.24sd and 0.18sd decline within a country over time. The fact that the estimate is stronger for political corruption is consistent with theory and evidence about the link between civic participation and democratic governance [ 78 ]: religious liberty and freedom of thought empowers individuals and encourages greater civic participation, thereby leading to greater accountability and transparency.

Turning towards more direct measures of democratic governance based on the exercise of freedom, a 1sd rise in religious liberty is associated with a 0.59sd, 0.30sd, 0.34sd, and 0.55sd rise in civil liberties, women empowerment, access to justice, and freedom of expression, respectively, using only the within-country variation. The cross-sectional estimates are roughly 25-80% larger than the fixed effects estimates. The fact that improvements in religious liberty are so economically and statistically associated with improvements in these dimensions of freedom and civil liberties suggests it is the primary mechanism linking religious liberty and well-being. Finally, while there is a negative association between the probability of being in an armed conflict and improvements in religious liberty, the association is statistically insignificant.

Conclusion and policy implications

While these exercises do not provide a silver-bullet explanation behind the plausibly causal effect of improvements in religious liberty on dimensions of human flourishing, they suggest that religious liberty—and, more broadly, social capital [ 79 ]—and democratic institutions are complements, leading to greater freedom of expression and civil liberties for a country’s people. Absent the basic human right for individuals to believe and worship freely, it is hard to imagine how a country can promote economic and social prosperity: suppression of thought will necessarily inhibit entrepreneurship, innovation, and social welfare more broadly.

Using the most comprehensive database to date on measures of human flourishing across time and space, this paper quantifies the effects of religious liberty, finding that a 1sd rise in religious liberty is associated with a 0.03pp rise in the probability an individual is thriving and a 0.08sd rise in overall well-being. The baseline identification strategy exploits plausibly exogenous year-to-year changes in religious liberty restrictions, controlling for a wide array of demographic and country-specific factors, such as GDP growth and institutional quality. To understand their robustness, an alternative instrumental variables strategy that exploits historical variation in the exposure of countries to missionaries prior to 1923 suggests slightly larger estimates on human flourishing.

These results show that religious liberty should also be taken into account when constructing and evaluating measures of economic development and welfare. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America argued that religious liberty in America would be fundamental to its democratic governance and preservation of peace and stability, balancing the competing demands for materialism and religious fanaticism.

The results are particularly timely given the competition of values between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) where, for example, religious minorities in China are persecuted [ 80 ]. Moreover, given the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic and the international backlash against their failure to warn against the spread of the virus [ 81 , 82 ], the CCP has a unique opportunity to not only advance its own economic development through an expansion of religious liberty, but also signal to the international community that it is willing to make reasonable concessions on important human rights issues [ 46 ].

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Brian Grim, Byron Johnson, Gale Pooley, and Tyler VanderWeele for comments and suggestions. All errors and views are my own and do not represent any affiliated institutions.

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Active from 2017 to 2019, the Religious Freedom Research Project (RFRP) was the nation's only university-based research program devoted exclusively to the analysis of religious freedom, a basic human right restricted in many parts of the world. The RFRP brought together leading scholars and policymakers to examine and debate the evolution of international religious freedom policy and the contributions of religious liberty to the global common good. Thomas Farr served as RFRP director from 2017 to July 2018; other previous project scholars include Timothy Shah, who served as director for international research, and Andrew Bennett and Byron Johnson, who were senior research fellows. The project was made possible by a partnership with Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion and the generous support of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the William E. Simon Foundation.

The RFRP was one of two successor organizations to grow out of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project (2011-2016). The other is the Religious Freedom Institute , an independent NGO.

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In 2021, government restrictions on religion – laws, policies and actions by state officials that limit religious beliefs and practices – reached a new peak globally. Harassment of religious groups and interference in worship were two of the most common forms of government restrictions worldwide that year.

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Religious, Civil, and Economic Freedoms: What's the Chicken and What's the Egg?

45 Pages Posted: 1 May 2021

Christos Makridis

Stanford University; Institute for the Future (IFF), Department of Digital Innovation, School of Business, University of Nicosia; Arizona State University (ASU); Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

Date Written: April 24, 2021

This paper studies the relationship between religious liberty and economic freedom. First, three new facts emerge: (a) religious liberty has increased since 1960, but has slipped substantially over the past decade; (b) the countries that experienced the largest declines in religious liberty tend to have greater economic freedom, especially property rights; (c) changes in religious liberty are associated with changes in the allocation of time to religious activities. Second, using a combination of vector autoregressions and dynamic panel methods, improvements in religious liberty tend to precede economic freedom. Finally, increases in religious liberty have a wide array of spillovers that are important determinants of economic freedom and explain the direction of causality. Countries cannot have long-run economic prosperity and freedom without actively allowing for and promoting religious liberty.

Keywords: Economic Development, Economic Freedom, Human Flourishing, Religious Liberty

JEL Classification: E61, H41, O43, O47

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Christos Makridis (Contact Author)

Stanford university ( email ).

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Institute for the Future (IFF), Department of Digital Innovation, School of Business, University of Nicosia ( email )

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Book contents

• Frontmatter
• The Religious Freedom Research Project
• Contributing Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Christianity and Freedom: Ancient Roots and Historical Innovations
• 1 The Roots of Religious Freedom in Early Christian Thought
• 2 The Christian Roots of Religious Freedom
• 3 Lactantius on Religious Liberty and His Influence on Constantine
• 4 Augustine and Religious Freedom
• 5 Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity
• 6 Liberty of Conscience and Freedom of Religion in the Medieval Canonists and Theologians
• 7 Faith, Liberty, and the Defense of the Poor: Bishop Las Casas in the History of Human Rights
• 8 Calvinist Contributions to Freedom in Early Modern Europe
• 9 Constitutional Protection of the Freedom of Conscience in Colonial America: The Rhode Island and Pennsylvania Experiments
• 10 Christianity and Freedom in the American Founding
• 11 Vibrant Christian Pluralism and the Evolution and Defense of Religious Liberty in America
• 12 Orthodox Christian Contributions to Freedom: Historical Foundations, Contemporary Problematics
• 13 Christianity: A Straggler on the Road to Liberty?
• 14 Protestant Missionaries and the Centrality of Conversion Attempts for the Spread of Education, Printing, Colonial Reform, and Political Democracy
• 15 God and Freedom: Biblical Roots of the Western Idea of Liberty

1 - The Roots of Religious Freedom in Early Christian Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2016

A certain established orthodoxy has settled over scholarly thinking concerning the relationship between the Christian church and political freedom. Consider the work of the political philosopher John Rawls, who has exerted a towering impact on a generation of political scientists, philosophers, legal scholars, practicing lawyers, public policy professionals, and judges. Rawls often begins his treatments of liberalism with what might be considered a Genesis narrative. Once upon a time, there was “Christianity,” which was “authoritarian,” “expansionist,” and dominated by a clerical elite who had special access to the Truth and to the means of Grace. Far from making positive intellectual or institutional contributions to the historical development of political freedom, in this near-canonical account, Christianity created intractable problems for freedom that only liberalism could solve. In this narrative, Christianity was the great moral and political problem to which Enlightenment liberalism was the necessary solution.

According to this startling view, which dates back at least to the Enlightenment and is evident in the work of John Rawls and many other influential scholars, the Christian church and political freedom are completely at odds. A major study by Perez Zagorin, for example, takes this view for granted: “[A] Christian theory of persecution … long antedated any concept or philosophy of religious toleration and freedom.” This view embeds a spirit of intolerance and militant proselytization in Christianity's DNA. And it believes doctrines of liberalism, democracy, and freedom of conscience had to emerge independently of and indeed in direct revolt against Christianity.

If this account of the conventional wisdom now prevailing in the academy may seem far-fetched, consider that in a recent issue of the academic journal Contemporary Sociology , a senior sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania summarized “the net effects of religion and faith on happiness.” What did he conclude? “[A] few thousand of years of horrible wars, genocide, slavery's ideology, sexual exploitation, torture, devaluing others as not human, terrorism, and organized hatred.” This widespread view encourages the belief that whatever persecution Christian communities experience must be deserved – must be a legitimate response to Christianity's own intolerance. The prominent New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson considers this the real reason for Roman persecution of early Christianity. Johnson writes, “Rome's unusual intolerance in [Christianity's] case was a response to [Christianity's] own intolerance of diversity.”

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• The Roots of Religious Freedom in Early Christian Thought
• By Timothy Samuel Shah , Georgetown University
• Edited by Timothy Samuel Shah , Georgetown University, Washington DC , Allen D. Hertzke , University of Oklahoma
• Book: Christianity and Freedom
• Online publication: 05 May 2016
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.003

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Humanity Journal

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THE POLITICS OF ARTICLE 18: RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

When the international human rights regime emerged in the 1940s, the right to religious liberty stood out as one of its central principles. It was one of the cornerstones in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” address; was singled out as one of the moral objectives of war that the Allied powers declared on New Year’s Day 1942; and was incorporated into most prototypical international bills of rights elaborated by various states, international law institutes, and individual activists during the war years. Yet even if the concept of religious liberty was central in the era’s fledgling human rights discourse, it remained entirely unclear what its basic components actually were, let alone how these should be phrased in an international document. This was one of the challenges that faced the United Nations’ original Commission on Human Rights and its designated Drafting Committee. After extensive discussion, it resolved by crafting Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. As has been evident in the ensuing decades, this articulation of religious liberty permits a variety of interpretations. Article 18 never addresses the difficult questions of how the relation between states and religious institutions should be regulated; it leaves terms like “teaching,” “practice,” “worship,” and “observance” undefined; and it never clarifies under which circumstances religious liberty can and cannot be curtailed. According to Malcolm D. Evans, the nature of the drafting process anticipated many of the contemporary debates on the nature of these aspects. Although most states found it possible to endorse the Drafting Committee’s proposal, they did so with very different understandings of what it implied. Therefore, Evans concludes, “what has proven to be one of the most influential statements of religious rights of mankind yet devised entered into the international arena with no further light shed upon its meaning.”1 The implication of this argument is that Article 18 in itself is a minimalistic and unproblematic articulation of religious liberty, one which had no specific meaning in the postwar moment, just as it has no stable meaning today. This may be a reasonable conclusion to reach from the traces of the drafting process that we encounter in the official meeting records of the United Nations. These give the impression of a hasty debate in which many different positions were voiced but generally without thorough explanation. But if we go beyond the official records and place this articulation of religious liberty in a broader intellectual and political context, a different picture emerges. By following some of the main actors who were involved in shaping Article 18, this essay will suggest that its primary components—its stress on the inner dimensions of conscience and belief, as well as the right to change one’s religion—reflected very particular political and intellectual currents in the postwar moment. Article 18 was not the result of some abstract overlapping consensus but rather a triumph for a few actors to whom its details mattered. This essay is divided into three historical sections: the first deals not so much with Article 18 per se as with the expunction of minority rights from the UDHR. This decision, which was driven by the United States and France, meant that all institutional aspects of religious liberty were exorcised from the document; it essentially paved the way for a conceptualization of the term that centered on the religious and existential choice of the individual person. The second section traces the impact of personalism in the shaping of Article 18. Through the groundbreaking work of Marco Duranti and Samuel Moyn, this heterogeneous intellectual current has been portrayed as the main vehicle for the language of human rights in the immediate postwar era.2 Section two seeks to contribute to this new historiography by arguing that one of the really lasting impacts of personalism on the international human rights regime is the fundamental distinction between absolute liberty of conscience and the qualified liberty to “manifest” one’s religion or beliefs. The third section of this essay then turns to the controversies surrounding the right to change one’s religion. This right made its way to the final text largely due to the interventions of representatives of the international ecumenical movement with reference to encounters between Christian missionaries and what they called “Islamic severity” in the Middle East. The conclusion of this essay suggests that what these actors did was subtly but importantly to transform the way religious liberty was framed in international affairs. The minority rights treaties of the League of Nations and the prototypical bills of human rights that emerged in the thirties and forties all focused on tangible dimensions of religious life: the “free exercise” of any creed; the “freedom of worship”; as well as the right to establish and maintain faith schools and other religious institutions. None of these documents gave particular attention to the inner dimensions of conscience or spelled out protection for the person’s religious choice. These were aspects that Article 18 in the UDHR inaugurated, and which the identical articula-dtion of religious liberty in Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights fortified.

The End of Institutional Religious Liberty The original draft version of the Universal Declaration, which was prepared by the UN Secretariat in 1947, contained not one article with direct relevance for religious liberty but two. The second article, Article 46, had been copied from the British international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht’s self-styled International Bill of the Rights of Man from 1945. Its elements were nonetheless familiar to diplomats and scholars of international law at the time. What Lauterpacht had done was essentially to merge the central components of the League of Nations’ minority rights treaties into a single article: In States inhabited by a substantial number of persons of a race, language or religion other than those of the majority of the population, persons belonging to such ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities shall have the rights as far as compatible with public order to establish and maintain their schools and cultural or religious institutions, and to use their own language in the press, in public assembly and before the courts and other authorities of the State.3 The rationale behind this particular article, Lauterpacht explained, was a fundamental concern with the right to equality. He argued that “true equality” cannot be reduced to equal opportunities between individuals but essentially concerns the relation between a nation’s majority and its minorities. In Lauterpacht’s view, this relation could never be considered equal if a minority “were deprived of its own institutions,” which would compel it to “renounce that which constitutes the very essence of its being as a minority.”4 In spite of the initial support that several delegates proclaimed for the article, and in spite of attempts to revive it during the final negotiations in 1948, the General Assembly eventually declared that because of the delicacy of the issue, “which has special aspects in each State in which it arises,” there would be no reference to minority rights in the Declaration.5 There are different accounts as to why this happened. According to Johannes Morsink’s detailed analysis of the drafting process, early support began to waver in 1947 when the General Assembly, in a parallel process, decided to omit the crime of “cultural genocide” from the Genocide Convention (a concept that had broadened the definition of genocide to include acts committed with the intention of destroying a group’s “language, religion or culture” and not just the group as such). “If not there, then not here either” was the logic that the members of the drafting committee seemed to follow. The main factor that Morsink isolates is nonetheless that the minority rights article lacked an organized lobby. The efforts of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Denmark to resurrect the original Article 46 during the last stages of the drafting were desperate and ill-coordinated and did not convince potentially undecided voters.6 From a more general standpoint, Mark Mazower has famously argued that the reason for which human rights became politically appealing in the first place was that they promised to function as an antidote to the dysfunctional minority rights system of the League of Nations. This system, which had been established as part of the peace of 1919, was made up of international treaties between the Allied powers and the new and reformed states of Eastern and Central Europe, in which the latter promised certain rights to members of minority populations in exchange for international recognition. But mainly due to the way the Nazi regime exploited the situation of German minorities in foreign territories as carte blanche for its expansionist policies, the entire notion of granting certain rights to “disloyal” minority populations became highly discredited after the war. In contrast to the paternalistic system of minority treaties, the new doctrine of individual human rights could boast universal significance, and in the shape of a nonbinding moral standard of achievement it also appeared less threatening to the protection of state sovereignty and national cohesion.7 This notion of a broader shift from “minority rights” to “human rights” in international affairs provides some insight into why Article 46 was deleted. But the picture becomes more complex when we consider the political agendas of the two actors who led the opposition against it: René Cassin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Cassin clearly viewed minority rights and human rights as incompatible concepts and construed the shift from the one to the other in evolutionary terms. Whereas the interwar treaties “had envisaged sponsoring only the protection of certain categories of men,” he maintained, the new bill set out “to protect the whole man and to protect the rights of all men.”8 As Glenda Sluga points out in her recent work on Cassin’s political trajectory in the human rights field, this commitment to the universality of the rights of man was also intimately bound up with his defense of imperial France. During the war and the immediate years thereafter, Cassin insisted on allowing subjects scattered across the empire to “seek political convergence as French citizens and patriots” but opposed the idea of decolonization. He feared that such geopolitical transformations might create ethnically defined states where outsiders would be reconstituted as second-class citizens.9 Cassin thus fought hard to stonewall attempts to reintroduce minority rights into the Universal Declaration. If the content of Article 46 were realized, there would be a “danger of cutting off certain communities and thereby working against the community of nations”: Such measures might result in certain populations being unable to read any newspapers except those printed in their own tongue, and their being excluded from taking part in competitive examinations for official posts or in the active life of the nation; thus, a whole category of persons, whose emancipation was being sought would instead be cut off from their surroundings.10 Another dimension to Cassin’s opposition to minority rights was his own secular Jewish identity, which in 1943 translated into political action when he was appointed chairman of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Since its inception in 1860, the Alliance had presented itself as a platform for “fortunate Jews” to help “to work everywhere for the emancipation and moral progress of the Jews; [and] to offer effective assistance to Jews suffering from antisemitism.” Its principal strategy to achieve these aims was to teach Jews to act as useful citizens and thereby earn their own emancipation. To facilitate this process, the Alliance set up a transnational network of secular Jewish schools (not least in the Balkans and the Middle East).11 The strong emphasis on the French language in the curricula of these schools bears witness to the intimate ties between the Alliance and the French empire. Its struggle for Jewish emancipation was from the beginning equated with the resurrection of French republican ideals, and as André Chouraqui argues in his in-house history of the organization, no one represented this conflation between Jewish emancipation and French republican ideals more perfectly than the statesman, lawyer, and humanist René Cassin.12 In the words of one of his biographers: “The mission of René Cassin is not to save the Jews of France, but to save France so that she herself saves the Jews.”13 The relation between the Alliance and the emergence of international human rights is an interesting but still largely unexplored area. Moria Paz argues that it is hard to overestimate the importance of the Alliance in the development of the international protection of human rights. During the Congress of Berlin in 1878, it successfully pushed for a ban of discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation in the outcome document. During the Paris Peace Conference, however, the Alliance gave in to pressure from Jewish nationalist groups and reluctantly supported the idea of positive minority rights that ended up in the treaties. It did so with the belief that such rights would be beneficial for the long-term goal of emancipation: “If unmolested for about a quarter of a century,” it claimed in its memorandum to the Peace Conference, “the Jews . . . would assuredly abandon the [Yiddish] jargon in favor of the language of the country.”14 Thus, from the standpoint of the organization over which Cassin presided, the Universal Declaration’s silence on positive minority rights constituted a belated triumph of a completely individualized rights regime for which it had fought already thirty years earlier. Eleanor Roosevelt’s battle against minority rights paralleled Cassin’s but had very different origins. During the drafting process she repeatedly insisted that minorities “did not exist as such in the United States” and that her government instead practiced a policy of cultural assimilation. Moreover, since the problem of minorities was “not of universal significance,” it would be a contradiction in terms to incorporate minority rights into a universal document.15 Roosevelt’s statements are perhaps best read as an echo of what Carol Anderson has called the American government’s “semantic legerdemain” on the issue of minorities during the lead-in to the Cold War. In 1947 the NAACP submitted its petition “An Appeal to the World,” which asked the UN Human Rights Commission to take action against continuous racial inequality in the United States on the basis that it constituted a “denial of human rights to minorities.” Against this backdrop, as well as the attempts of states with “competing philosophies” to exploit American “shortcomings” in this area, the State Department decided to emphasize the difference between the minorities issue in the United States and Europe.16 According to its own inquiry, there were no “national minorities” in the country, since neither African Americans, Mexican Americans, nor Native Americans sought to “secede” from the United States. Nor did any of these groups have a “distinct culture or language.” What they wanted was instead to be fully integrated into the American nation.17 Weakness in the area of minorities and racial equality constituted an immanent threat to American influence in the context of the drafting of the Universal Declaration. Roosevelt realized this and therefore worked hard to get the issue of minority rights off the table. In her correspondence with the NAACP leaders she insisted that she basically agreed with their position, but in practice she aligned herself with the official American stance that the Human Rights Commission was the wrong forum for the fight for civil rights and that attempts in this direction would only aid the Soviet Union in besmirching the reputation of the United States. As should be evident by now, neither Cassin nor Roosevelt was expressly concerned with religion when opposing the language of minority rights in the Universal Declaration. Although all proposals of this article included protection for the institutional rights of religious minorities, these aspects were almost entirely absent from the debates that surrounded it. To some extent, the religious liberty dimensions of the proposed Article 46 were remnants of how the issue of minorities had been addressed in previous eras of European diplomacy. While the discussions on minorities in Westphalia in 1648 and Berlin in 1878 had revolved around different religious communities that disrupted the established principle of internal religious unity within states, they now centered on problems relating to race and nationality. The decision to strike all references to the rights of minorities in the Universal Declaration was, in other words, not driven by an antipathy toward religious institutions per se but a concern for what Cassin called the “society of nations.” The institutional aspects of religious liberty—in spite of their long history in European diplomacy—were effectively and unceremoniously thrown out with the bathwater.

Religious Liberty of the Human Person Leaving the UDHR’s silence on minority rights aside, this section turns to the Declaration’s principal articulation of religious liberty: Article 18. In what follows, I will argue that one of the basic features of this articulation—the distinction between inner and external liberty—is best explained in light of the direct and indirect influences of Christian personalism on the drafting process. While many commentators of religious liberty in international human rights law see this distinction as “immutable” and “inescapable,” I will argue that it was a product of 1948 and marked a subtle rupture with how religious liberty had been articulated in the minority treaties, as well as in most of the prototypical human rights declarations of the interwar period.18 The ideological importance of personalism has until recently been absent from historical accounts of the emergence of international human rights. Samuel Moyn, whose work has sought to underscore personalism as the main “vehicle” for the human rights idea in the 1940s, sees this absence as a consequence of the prejudices that contemporary historians of human rights have brought to the field: In early postwar Europe, human rights were—contrary to current expectations and desires—most associated with neither a revolutionary nor a republican heritage. For almost nobody were they the essence of post-Holocaust wisdom, not least since the crimes of Nazi evildoers were not yet understood to be primarily ones against the Jewish people. Finally, they were not the inspiration for a new sort of private activism, which had other and later sources. Instead, human rights need to be closely linked, in their beginnings, to an epoch-making reinvention of conservatism.19 Moyn uses the terms “personalism,” “Christian democracy,” and “conservatism” interchangeably with the awareness that they are vague ideological labels that do not correspond to any coherent school of thought. What united the various “personalisms” that were formulated during the first half of the twentieth century was a desire to find a communitarian, and often explicitly religious, third way between the “rival materialisms of liberalism and communism.” This vagueness of personalism, Moyn continues, “was, in a sense, its genius; it signaled the identity of the opposition clearly, while leaving flexibility about what the alternative program was.”20 Accordingly, there was no fixed place for human rights in any of the personalist programs, and many of its leading figures rejected the concept for its association with the very bourgeois liberalism they were trying to counteract. One of the prolific personalists who initially avoided the human rights idea, but who later became its leading proponent and theoretician, was the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain’s transformation was triggered by a number of circumstances: the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, the escalation of anti-Semitism across continental Europe, the Vatican’s strategic embrace of rights talk, and his own encounter with American democracy during his years in exile. In a later reflection on the last of these experiences, Maritain confessed that he had been surprised to find in the United States the “least materialistic of all modern peoples which had reached the industrial age.” America was, Maritain claimed, not the tragedy of modernity perfected but rather was clearly headed in the direction of becoming the utopian society he himself envisaged in his political thinking: a society where persons of different faiths were working together for the common good in a temporal order still suffused with a Christian spirit, a society which, in Maritain’s terms, was both personnaliste and communautaire.21 There is no doubt that Maritain’s embrace of human rights was inspired by these experiences. His defense of human rights, however, is strictly philosophical and unequivocally Thomistic. He starts off by characterizing the “Natural Law” as derived from (yet distinctly different from) the “Eternal Law.” Its author is “divine reason” alone, and the human intellect has no part in establishing or decoding it. Yet divine reason “imprints its light upon human reason,” allowing the person to acquire knowledge of the Natural Law and to distinguish between good and evil through his natural inclination.22 By conforming to these inclinations, the person is able to transcend material existence and participate in the eternal order. This notion of participation is central to Maritain, since it helps him distinguish his own conceptualization of the Natural Law, with a capital N, from the lesser versions that we encounter in the works of Enlightenment philosophers like Hugo Grotius, who (as Maritain makes sure to remind us) at one point argued that natural law would still have a “degree of validity” even if “there is no God, or . . . the affairs of men are of no concern to Him.”23 The first principle of the Natural Law, to do good and avoid evil, is also Maritain’s starting point for his take on religious liberty. The first principle obliges the person not only “to act in a spirit of brotherhood” (as the Universal Declaration later held) but also to choose the right religious path. The person is morally bound by the Natural Law to realize that he is “made for God, for a life superior to time.”24 This positive liberty (to use Isaiah Berlin’s bold distinction) for the person to develop toward his final cause is also the basis for the human person’s negative liberty in relation to his fellow men and the temporal powers.25 It is in order for the person to perform his moral task, to “hearken unto God, and to make its way to Him,” that he is entitled to certain temporal freedoms: With respect to God and truth, one has not the right to choose according to his own whim any path whatsoever; he must choose the true path, insofar as it is in his power to know it. But with respect to the State, to the temporal community and to the temporal power, he is free to choose the religious path at his own risk; his freedom of conscience is a natural, inviolable right.26 In a footnote to this passage, Maritain adds the caveat that the person’s temporal freedom of religion is restricted to the choice of religious path. The inviolable freedom of conscience does not cover the freedom to manifest one’s religious choice in a way that is contrary to the Natural Law: “If this religious path goes so very far afield that it leads to acts repugnant to natural law the security of the State, the latter has the right to interdict and apply sanctions against these acts. This does not mean that it has authority in the realm of conscience.” These passages, Maritain explicitly argued, constituted the only reasonable way of interpreting what Franklin D. Roosevelt had called man’s “freedom to worship God in his own way.” This statement had clearly resonated with the priorities of those personalists who came to embrace a language of human rights. John Courtney Murray, one of the most prolific disciples of Maritain, praised Roosevelt for recognizing that religious liberty was a right of the human person not to be free from religion but to worship God in accordance with conscience. But to Maritain and Murray, religious liberty would only become intelligible if it were set in the light of the Natural Law—and doing so would also involve a shift of focus. The liberty of worship had to be subordinated to the liberty of conscience. It is well known that Maritain was involved with human rights work at the United Nations in the late 1940s. He participated with a chapter and a preface to UNESCO’s 1947 report on the practical justifications of human rights principles, which was compiled in tandem with the drafting of the Universal Declaration. But sometimes this was taken as proof of the fact that he exerted personal influence on the final form of the Declaration. This completely neglects how insignificant UNESCO’s report was for the political process in the UN. In fact, many members of the Human Rights Commission were unaware that it was being produced in the first place, and when they did learn about it they prohibited the report from being distributed to its members, arguing that it amounted to an attempt to interfere with the diplomatic process.27 Thus, if Maritain influenced the shape of the Universal Declaration in any way, he did so indirectly, and by proxy. Among the core members of the Human Rights Commission, it was the Lebanese delegate Charles Malik who most strongly represented the personalist approach to human rights. He repeatedly emphasized that he did not use “the word individual but the expression human person” when referring to the subject of the rights of man.28 The personalist language in the Declaration, including the description of man as being “endowed with reason and conscience” in Article 1, are direct results of his interventions. Some delegates felt that such proclamations on human nature were superfluous and could, in fact, be interpreted as criteria for the enjoyment of rights.29 In the end, however, they were willing to go along with Malik, who insisted that his proposal merely signaled which aspects of the human person distinguished him from animals and made him eligible to certain inalienable rights.30 At an early stage in the drafting process, Malik also advanced four core principles which he wanted the drafting committee to endorse as a common basis. These stressed that the value of the “human person” trumped the desires of the group or nation to which he may belong, but also that “the human person’s most sacred and inviolable possessions are his mind and his conscience, enabling him to perceive the truth, to choose freely, and to exist.”31 Malik was provoked into crafting this list of core principles by a statement from the Yugoslavian delegate Vladislav Ribnikar, who repudiated what he saw as the individualistic and middle-class tendencies in the human rights project, arguing, “Personal freedom could only be attained through perfect harmony between the individual and the community.”32 Ribnikar’s statement convinced Malik that men no longer had any “need for protection against kings or dictators, but rather against a new form of tyranny: that exercised by the masses and by the State.”33 Malik’s fears of “the dictatorship of the masses” and “the false religion” of communism were crucial aspects for legitimizing an enunciation of religious liberty that placed emphasis on the inward and spiritual dimensions of religiosity. It was these spiritual dimensions of man’s existence—the dimension of “truth, and life, and love”—that communism negated.34 In his double capacity as ambassador to the UN and to the United States, Malik combined his work in the Human Rights Commission with attempts to establish a military alliance between Lebanon and the United States as a means of aligning his own country with the Western side in this struggle.35 But there were other dimensions besides anticommunism to Malik’s zeal for this particular articulation of religious liberty. In a 1948 article for the American Academy of Political and Social Science, he sketched his take on the basic political issues of the Middle East in the aftermath of the World War. Above all, Malik stressed the challenges that arise when the forces of modernity are “breaking into the rural tranquility,” but he also devoted a section to what he called the region’s deep “spiritual crisis”: Religion has for the most part lost its authentic meaning; it has evaporated into casuistry, rendering its demands less difficult and its impositions less exacting; it has shifted its emphasis from faith and inwardness to rites and ceremonies. Our religious crisis is therefore this: that the birthplace of religion is no longer religious except in a derivative and external sense; the descendants of those who were granted the burden and vision of God hardly know His holy name. Our genuine Semitic religious fervour, failing to find vent for itself in authentic religious channels, frustrated in its depths by its own self-impoverishment, seeks an outlet for itself in the negative form of quasi-religious bigotry and fanaticism, and in sectarian ill will and hostility.36 To combat this widespread “bigotry,” Malik considered it imperative to work for a form of “religious renaissance” in the Middle East through which the authentic, spiritual dimensions of religious life would be revived. Although Malik did not refer explicitly to the “spiritual crisis” during the drafting of the Universal Declaration, it certainly provided an additional impetus for articulating religious liberty in a way that stressed the liberty of conscience, rather than the free exercise of religious practices. Twenty years later, when Malik reflected on his contributions to the making of the Universal Declaration, he highlighted his involvement in the shaping of Article 18 and explained why he had considered the inner liberty of conscience so important: In no text did I take as much anxious interest as in this text on freedom of thought, conscience and religion. What constitutes humanity more than anything else is this inward freedom which should therefore be absolutely inviolable. Hence, though I cared for every word in the Declaration, I felt that, if we should lose on this Article on freedom of conscience and religion, namely, if man’s absolute freedom were to be derogated from, in any way, even by the subtlest indirection, my interest in the remainder of the Declaration would considerably flag . . . Without the full and unimpaired right to think and believe freely, the value of these other rights pales into relative insignificance. One enjoys these other rights precisely in order to be free, and being free means nothing if it does not mean freedom to think and believe and change in your belief from the good to the better and better as the truth progressively reveals itself to you. The right to be free inwardly is the end and justification of all other rights . . . The very essence of freedom is the right to become, not the right to be.37 In this passage, Malik’s allegiance to a distinctly personalist version of religious liberty becomes apparent. The core of this principle is not the external freedom of worship or exercise but the person’s “right to become.” This signals a dynamic understanding of what religion is and of how convictions are formed. Religious manifestations are envisioned not as reflections of static creeds but of deep individual processes. But the personalistic version of religious liberty was also apolitical. The person’s process of “becoming”–takes place in his own inner citadel, which appears beyond reach of the temporal powers. This makes religious liberty a frail political good, since religious expressions could be curtailed without damaging the core of belief and conscience. The only aspect of freedom of conscience that is specified in Article 18, and which indeed gives it a tangible dimension, is the right to change one’s religion. Malik put a lot of effort into the inclusion of this aspect, which he considered central to an understanding of religious liberty that focused on the individual person’s religious choice. But this aspect also distinguished Malik’s understanding of religious liberty from that of Maritain, who, in spite of his own conversion experience, never mentioned it in his own writings on human rights. This might point to a subtle tension between these different takes on personalism, one that merits further research. In the following section, however, I want to suggest that Malik’s struggle for the right to change one’s religion was spurred by not only his own convictions but also one of his principal allies in the drafting process: the international ecumenical movement.

The Ecumenical Movement and the Right to Change One’s Religion The ecumenical movement’s struggle for international recognition of the right to change one’s religion did not begin in the context of the United Nations. This had for a long time been a prime concern for Christian missionary organizations in the Middle East. As Saba Mahmood notes in her important piece on this topic, for missionaries in the Ottoman Empire and their European supporters, “religious liberty meant the freedom to proselytize in the Ottoman territories and an important means for securing religious conversion.”38 But it was only with the emergence of international human rights that this was elevated to an ostensibly “universal” struggle. The case of the British mandate for Palestine provides an interesting illustration of this transformation. In 1917, the Conference of Missionary Societies (CMS) requested of the British government that it use its presence in Palestine to repeal Ottoman restrictions on religious conversion. In 1937, this message was repeated in a memorandum on “Religious Freedom in Palestine” submitted to the Colonial Secretary. “The guarantee of freedom of conscience,” the document stated, “should explicitly include freedom of religious conversion, and those who profess conversion and desire to change their religion should keep their civil rights intact.”39 This met with little interest from the Peel Commission, which instead recommended that the future Arab and Jewish states should embrace the same form of minority rights protection as Iraq had done when it was released from mandatory control. This included protection for establishment of schools, charitable organizations, and other religious institutions, but also the autonomy to set up religious courts with jurisdiction over family law and issues of personal status. In essence, this was merely a way of repackaging the British updated version of the Ottoman millet system in the contemporary language of minority protection.40 In 1947, British Protestants tried to convince the United Nations Special Committee for Palestine (UNSCOP) of the necessity of including this right in the Partition Plan for Palestine. W. H. Stewart (bishop, Church of England in Jerusalem) and W. Clark-Kerr (moderator, Church of Scotland in Jerusalem) summed up the “Christian interests” in the country with the motto “Shrines and Souls”: the protection of religious sites and the protection of religious liberty. The term “Shrines” not only included a few buildings in Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem but encompassed the entire territory, its history and “atmosphere.” The churches had noted with dismay a tendency toward “corruption of atmosphere,” a “secularization of sacred things and of sacred places.” The reason for this deterioration, they argued, was the government’s commitment to religious neutrality, which in fact had been exaggerated to the point that it worked against the interests of Christianity.41 After this general concern for the Holy Land, Stewart and Clark-Kerr continued with the dimension of “religious liberty” which they equated with the term “souls.” When characterizing this liberty, Stewart emphasized that its most central aspect was the right to change one’s religion: “We have emphasized, perhaps somewhat severely, what we regard to be really the lack of true religious freedom in this country, particularly when religious freedom is interpreted, and we hold it should be, to allow freedom of conversion from one faith to another.”42 But once again, the Protestants’ conceptualization of religious liberty was disregarded. The Partition Plan dedicated two chapters to prescribing the organization of religious life in the successor states of the Mandate. Even if this included a general declaration of the “freedom of conscience and the free exercise of all forms of worship,” the central message was that the states should uphold the system of allowing far-reaching autonomy to religious communities in the realms of family law and education.43 Thus, even if the institutional aspects of religious liberty were excluded from religious liberty in the Universal Declaration, it was entirely possible for the members of the General Assembly to accentuate the very same aspects when dealing with the specific context of Palestine. The ecumenical engagement with international human rights took off in the early 1940s when the American Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and Foreign Mission Council (FMC) set up a Joint Committee on Religious Liberty (JCRL). The explicit aim of this group was to work for an international charter of human rights that would have “a satisfactory place for the protection of religion and conscience” within it. For this purpose, the Committee’s first undertaking was to craft a “brief and clear formulation of what religious liberty actually means.”44 This resulted in a “Statement on Religious Liberty” that was distributed to the Roosevelt administration, to members of the American Congress, to heads of diplomatic missions in the United States, and to a wide range of church organizations in the United States and abroad.45 The core paragraph of the Statement suggested an interpretation of religious liberty in line with the interests of JCRL’s mother organizations: Religious liberty shall be interpreted to include freedom to worship according to conscience and to bring up children in the faith of their parents; freedom for the individual to change his religion; freedom to preach, educate, publish, and carry on missionary activities; and freedom to organize with others, and to acquire and hold property, for these purposes.46 The Statement was followed by a series of memoranda that developed some of the principles in the Statement (i.e., the intimate connection between religious liberty and civil rights) and pointed out certain “ways in which [the Statement] may be used by our government.” The series concluded with a memorandum that deplored the absence of a designated human rights bureau in the Dumbarton Oaks proposal for the shape of the United Nations.47 During the negotiations on the UN Charter in San Francisco, JCRL’s front man O. Frederick Nolde was also named an associate of the FCC’s advisory group to the U.S. delegation, with a special responsibility for advancing the human rights cause. In this capacity, he was able to establish a consensus in the American NGO group on the need for laying stress on the language of human rights in the Charter, not least through the establishment of a designated Human Rights Commission. The American delegation took notice and was joined by other sponsoring powers in pushing for explicit mention of such a Commission in Article 68 of the Charter.48 Even if religious liberty was the principal mission of the JCRL, this soon became inseparable from its exertion for international human rights in general. When the Commission eventually came to life and began its work drawing up an international bill of human rights, Nolde reappeared in the UN corridors as director of the Churches’ Commission of International Affairs (CCIA), the diplomatic branch of the nascent World Council of Churches. In this capacity he attended almost every session of the Commission and established professional relationships with most of the delegation (apart from the Russians). Although he closely monitored all of the Commission’s work, his primary concern was of course the article on religious liberty. Here he made several significant contributions, not least by helping to secure the right to change one’s religion but also by pinpointing four categories of manifestation: worship, practice, teaching, and observance. This made one of the core members of the Drafting Committee conclude that Article 18 was indeed “principally his fashioning.”49 But Nolde’s was not the brain behind the JCRL’s struggle for international religious liberty. The political background to this work becomes more fully discernible if we examine the most intellectually ambitious of JCRL’s activities: Religious Liberty: An Inquiry, compiled by the Baptist missionary and layman Searle Bates in 1945. Stretching over a good six hundred pages, Religious Liberty set out not only to examine the status of religious liberty in all corners of the world but also to provide an overview of the principle’s historical evolution, philosophical and religious ways of justifying it, as well as a discussion of different problems relating to its articulation. Religious Liberty contains an extensive philosophical section which betrays the impact of personalist human rights language on Protestants as well. Bates employs Maritain’s work as proof of the possibility of rapprochement between Catholic and Protestant thought on religious liberty. Bates refers to Maritain no less than twelve times over the course of the book, describing him as the philosopher of late who had most successfully spelled out “in the light of Christian faith and in the experience of modern and contemporary society, a right relation of Church and State.”50 In some passages, Bates also adheres closely to Maritain’s conceptualization of religious liberty as a protection of the human person’s moral responsibility to reach God. This is not least apparent in Bates’s own attempt to spell out the core principle of religious liberty: “Rooted deeply in the moral freedom to choose among good courses, where inferior courses are also possible, religious liberty may be defined as actualized opportunity for individuals and groups to pursue high spiritual aims.”51 Even so, it is evident from the book that the ecumenical movement’s engagement with religious liberty originated in a concern for very particular political situations. When identifying these in the opening chapters of Religious Liberty, Bates (like most human rights activists at the end of the war) did not turn to the recent mass murder of Jews in Nazi Germany. Instead, he found the most acute denials of religious liberty in Soviet Russia, Franco’s Spain, and in the “Moslem Countries.” The latter of these three examples recurs throughout his book as a straw man that helps to define religious liberty by way of negation: “Orthodox Islam is the contrary on religious liberty and finds no room for the concept as developed in Western lands. In principle it forbids apostasy under dire penalty and provides for change of faith only toward Islam.”52 In Bates’s hands, even a presumably positive concept in Islamic legal tradition like ‘Ahl al-Kita;amb (peoples of the book) is turned into a proof of Islam’s incompatibility with the Western tradition of religious liberty: Historically established “religions of the book,” notably Christianity and Judaism, are allowed to continue in quiescent communities, on sufferance, so long as they do not challenge in the slightest manner the dominant Islamic society. Even they are under stronger pressure than the people of other lands can readily understand. Hundreds of Copts in Egypt turn each year to Islam for economic or for matrimonial reasons.53 In a later passage, Bates once again confirmed that the ecumenical movement’s early efforts to specify the necessary components of religious liberty had been made in light of “the socio-religious-political pressures for uniformity in the Mohammedan societies.”54 Thus the stress on the freedom of religious choice and the freedom to change was not derived from an abstract notion of what religious liberty is but rather stemmed from tangible concerns voiced by missionary organizations. By having this component of religious liberty recognized as a universal human right, they sought international legitimacy for those forces that worked to transform the political and religious landscapes of “Mohammedan societies.” As the General Assembly’s Third Committee convened in the Parisian winter of 1948 to finalize the Declaration, the freedom to change one’s religion was the only aspect of article 18 that generated controversy. Above all, this criticism was voiced by states with predominantly Muslim populations, but not in reference to the ban on apostasy in Islamic law. It was not so much the substantial right to change one’s beliefs that upset delegations like Saudi Arabia (its representatives even recognized this right to be implied in the liberty of conscience) as the imperial and evangelical connotations that it triggered. In their rhetoric, these opponents of the right to change focused on how Christian missionaries throughout history had abused the invocation of such rights to stir up religious emotions and pave the way for political interventions. The opposition of some Middle Eastern states to Article 18 was, in other words, not so much a repudiation of religious liberty as an abstract political concept but a response to an active provocation.55 Interestingly, the only delegate to refer explicitly to Islam in this context, the Pakistani Zafrullah Khan, did so while soliciting his country’s support for the Article. After lengthy consultations with Malik, which included intensive study of the Quran, he reached the conclusion that full freedom of religious choice best captured the core of Islam. “Apostasy, by itself,” he later explained, “however condemnable is a spiritual offense and entails no temporal penalty. This is the essence of the freedom to change one’s religion. The Quran is explicit on it.”56

Conclusions Article 18 of the Universal Declaration was not a self-evident articulation of religious liberty. On the contrary, it marked an important departure from how this principle had previously been defined in international fora. In the Berlin Treaty of 1878 and the minority treaties that emanated from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, religious liberty had primarily been construed as a negative obligation of states to respect the “free exercise of religion.” This formula was also incorporated into the draft bill of international human rights that the Institute de droit internationale proposed in 1929. In keeping with FDR’s “Four Freedoms” address, the American Law Institute’s 1944 Statement on Essential Human Rights proposed that religious liberty be spelled out as the duty of states to protect the “freedom of belief and of worship.” Neither of these enunciations explicitly linked religious liberty to the freedom of “thought” or “conscience.” In this regard, Article 18 marked a subtle but distinct change of tone. This was a politically motivated departure. For personalists like Maritain and Malik, liberty of conscience was a far more forceful version of religious liberty than freedom of worship. In fact, the freedom of worship had been recognized by the Soviet Constitution of 1936, which to many observers proved just how politically ineffective this articulation of religious liberty was. Explicit connection to liberty of conscience signaled that religious liberty was an antimaterialist political good: it constituted a safeguard for the individual person’s ethical responsibility to choose God. Therefore, it also provided protection for religion itself, not just a limited category of religious practices. But it was not only communism that this version of religious liberty was taken to discredit. Malik also hoped that the globalization of liberty of conscience would stimulate a surge of religious authenticity in the Middle East, “the birthplace of religion,” which in his view had been corrupted by “quasi-religious bigotry and fanaticism.” In a similar way, the ecumenical movement’s quest to advance a version of religious liberty that centered on the freedom to change one’s religion fed into the struggle of Christian missionaries to transform the political and religious landscape of the Middle East. It was, in short, its instrumentality that made religious liberty so attractive: it was not merely an inherent feature of a just society; it also promised to aid the dissemination and revival of Christianity as such. It is beyond doubt that religious liberty has acquired a very different meaning since Article 18 was formulated. Above all, the relationship between religious liberty and secularism has been turned upside-down. In 1948, religious liberty was envisioned as a first line of defense for Christianity against the dangers of secularism. Today, it is more often construed as one of the defining features of liberal secularist programs. Even international human rights institutions like the European Court of Human Rights have declared that political secularisms (e.g., Turkish and French laicism) are in line with how it understands religious liberty (although the Court’s consistency in this regard is highly questionable).57 Even as the legacy of 1948 does not determine how we understand religious liberty today, it is too simplistic to dismiss Article 18 as an empty vessel. This particular expression of religious liberty includes elements that make us inclined to classify certain situations as violations of religious liberty while neutralizing others. This is most apparent when it comes to the hierarchical distinction between internal and external freedom. In some of the more recent case law of the European Court of Human Rights, it has been evident that this distinction helps to de-dramatize certain curtailments of religious practices. When elaborating on its understanding of religious liberty in S;alahin v. Turkey, the Court reaffirmed that this right is “primarily a matter of individual conscience” and “does not protect every act motivated or inspired by a religion or belief.” From this basic premise, it could effectively frame the Turkish ban on the wearing of the hijab as a minor restriction of religious liberty, which left the core of free conscience and belief untouched.58 Moreover, as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues, different articulations of religious liberty also govern different forms of subjectivity: “Inasmuch as the protection of religious freedom hinges upon, and even sanctifies, a religious psychology that relies on the notion of an autonomous subject who chooses beliefs, and then enacts them, such projects privilege particular kinds of religious subjectivity while disabling others.”59 In other words, Article 18 defines not only the boundaries within which a subject may act but also what it means to be an authentic subject in the first place. From this perspective, the distinction between inner and external liberty once again becomes problematic. It not only helps to define religious liberty but offers an implicit definition of authentic religion as well. However, as this essay has shown, there is no reason to claim that Article 18 is a natural articulation of what religious liberty really is. It is only one of many expressions available in the Western tradition, just as it was only one of many versions in circulation during the postwar moment. Its triumph was the work of a few actors for whom this version of religious liberty formed the heart of what human rights were in 1948. It was a product of persistence, not consensus. During the final negotiations in the General Assembly, the Cuban delegate Guy Pérez Cisneros summed up the opinion of those states that gave in to these efforts. Article 18 was, in his view, “among those which had been least well drafted by the Commission on Human Rights. It began with a phrase which meant nothing, as it stated a right which was evident, which existed a priori and which need not be defended.” Furthermore, it “placed too much emphasis on the individual’s right to change his religion.” In spite of this general disapproval, Pérez Cisneros announced that his delegation had decided not to pick a fight, but instead to support Article 18 “in a spirit of conciliation.”60

NOTES I would like to thank Andrea Karlsson, Jesper Svartvik, Lena Halldenius, Anthony Fiscella, Elena Namli, Dan-Erik Andersson, and Kjell-Aåke Modéer for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers at Humanity for their thoughtful suggestions. 1. Malcolm D. Evans, Religious Liberty and International Law in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 191–92. 2. See above all Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 85–106; and Marco Duranti, “The Holocaust, the Legacy of 1789 and the Birth of International Human Rights Law: Revisiting the Foundation Myth,” Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 159–86. 3. E/CN.4/AC.1/3, Article 46. Cf. Hersch Lauterpacht, An International Bill of the Rights of Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 151. 4. Hersch Lauterpacht, International Law and Human Rights (New York: Praeger, 1950), 353. For a lucid account of Lauterpacht’s intellectual trajectory and a clear-sighted critique of International Law and Human Rights, see Martii Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 353–412. 5. A/C.3/373. 6. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 273–74, 377 n. 44. 7. Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 379–98; Mazower, “Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe,” Daedalus 126, no. 2 (1997): 47–63; Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 104–48. 8. René Cassin, La charte des droits de l’homme: Conférence Nobel (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1969). 9. Glenda Sluga, “René Cassin: Les droits de l’homme and the Universality of Human Rights, 1945–1966,” in Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, 111–12. Cf. Marc Agi, “De l’idée d’universalité comme fondatrice du concept des droits de l’homme d’après la vie et l’œuvre de René Cassin” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Nice, 1980); Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 99–120. 10. A/C.3/SR.161, 723. 11. Simon Schwarzfuchs and Frances Malino, “Alliance Israelite Universelle,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 671–75. 12. André Chouraqui, L’Alliance Israélite Universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine: Cent ans d’histoire (1860–1960) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 291. 13. Marc Agi, René Cassin: Fantassin de droits de l’homme (Paris: Plon, 1979), 131. 14. Moria Paz, “A Non-Territorial Ethnic Network and the Making of Human Rights Law: The Case of the Alliance Israelite Universelle,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Rights Law 4, no. 1 (2009): 1–24. For a definite account of Jewish diplomacy and minority rights in Versailles, see Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2004. 15. A/C.3/SR.161, 726. Cf. E/CN.4/SR.32, 4. 16. “To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights” (Washington: GPO, 1947). 17. Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1945–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 74–76. 18. Paul M. Taylor, Freedom of Religion: UN and European Human Rights Law and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 19; Martin Scheinin, “Article 18,” in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Common Standard of Achievement, ed. Gudmundur Alfredsson and Asbjørn Eide (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1999), 379–92. 19. Moyn, “Personalism,” 87. 20. Ibid., 88. 21. Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America (New York: Scribner, 1958). 22. A note on gender: I follow Maritain’s (and other personalists’) consistent use of the masculine pronoun when referring to both the human person and God. 23. Jacques Maritain, Natural Law: Reflections on Theory and Practice, ed. William Sweet (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 40–47; Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace (1625), prolegomena, §11. 24. Maritain, Natural Law, 77. 25. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72. For a critical analysis of Berlin’s distinction: Lena Halldenius, Liberty Revisited: A Historical and Systematic Account of an Egalitarian Conception of Liberty and Legitimacy (Lund: Bokbox Publications, 2001). 26. Jacques Maritain, Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (Paris: Hartmann, 1945), 79. 27. E/CN.4/SR.26, 12. 28. E/CN.4/SR.14, 6. 29. Morsink, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 297. 30. Glenn Mitoma, “Charles H. Malik and Human Rights: Notes on a Biography,” Biography 33, no. 1 (2010): 222–41. 31. E/CN.4/SR.14, 3–4. 32. E/CN.4/SR.8, 4. 33. E/CN.4/SR.9, 3. 34. Charles Habib Malik, Man in the Struggle for Peace (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 228. 35. Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto, 2007), 134, 267. 36. Charles Habib Malik, “The Basic Issues of the Near East,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 258, no. 1 (1948): 3. 37. Charles Habib Malik, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” in Free and Equal: Human Rights in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. O. Frederick Nolde (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1968), 11. 38. Saba Mahmood, “Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 2 (2012): 418–46. 39. Laura Robson, “Church, State, and the Holy Land: British Protestant Approaches to Imperial Policy in Palestine, 1917–1948,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 3 (2011): 465–66. See also Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 40. Palestine Partition Commission: Report October 1938 (His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1938), 152. 41. A/364, Add.II, 137–38. For a more thorough account of the “ambivalent friendship” between Anglican bishops in Jerusalem and the British mandatory government, see Maria Smaåberg, “Ambivalent Friendship: Anglican Conflict Handling and Education for Peace in Jerusalem, 1920–1948” (Ph.D. diss., Lund University, 2005). 42. A/364, Add II, 136. 43. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, 29 November 1947, chaps. 1–2. 44. Malik, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” 17. 45. Many commentators applauded it as a “fine and forward-looking document” but generally doubted that it would have any impact on concrete political action. See, for instance, W. E. B. Du Bois, “Prospect of a World without Race Conflict,” American Journal of Sociology 49, no. 5 (1944): 455. 46. “Statement on Religious Liberty,” adopted in 1944 by the Federal Council of Churches (April 12) and the Foreign Missions Conference (March 21). 47. “Proposals for the Establishment of a General International Organization” (Dumbarton Oaks, October 4, 1944) only mentioned “human rights and fundamental freedoms” when enumerating the general purposes of the organization in the area of economic and social cooperation. 48. Malik, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” 21–25. 49. Ibid., 10. 50. Searle Bates, Religious Liberty: An Inquiry (New York: International Missionary Council, 1945), 9, 41, 103–4, 197, 214, 297, 317, 322, 345, 385, 391, 404. 51. Ibid., 373. 52. Ibid., 9. 53. Ibid., 10. 54. Ibid., 305. 55. A/C.3/SR.127, 391–2, 403–4. 56. Zafrullah Khan, Islam and Human Rights (London: Islam International Publications, 1967), 117; Malik, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” 10, 45. 57. Samuel Moyn, “From Communist to Muslim: Religious Liberty in European Human Rights Law,” South Atlantic Quarterly, forthcoming; Peter Danchin, “Islam in the Secular Nomos of the European Court of Human Rights,” Michigan Journal of International Law 32, no. 4 (2011): 663–747. 58. Refah Partisi (No. 2) v. Turkey, 37 Eur. H. R. Rep. 1 (2003); S;alahin v. Turkey, 44 Eur. H. R. Rep. 5 (2007); Dogru v. France, App. No. 27058/05, 49 Eur. H. R. Rep. 179 (2008); Cf. Lautsi v. Italy, App. No. 30814/06 (2009) (Chamber); Lautsi v. Italy, App. No. 30814/06 (2011) (Grand Chamber). 59. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Believing in Religious Freedom,” Immanent Frame (2012), http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/03/01/believing-in-religious-freedom (accessed June 15, 2012). 60. A/C.3/SR.127, 404.

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Religion & Philosophy Research Guide: Databases

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• Greek & Hebrew
• Global Studies
• APOL 500 - Apologetics
• BIBL 104 - Survey of Biblical Literature
• BIBL 105 - Old Testament Survey
• BIBL 110 - New Testament Survey
• BIBL 323 - John
• BIBL 350 - Inductive Bible Study
• BIBL 360 - Methodical Study of Scripture
• BIBL 364 - Acts
• BIBL 366 - General Epistles
• BIBL 410 - Genesis
• BIBL 425 - Romans
• DMIN 810 - Foundations for the Doctor of Ministry
• EVAN 101 - Evangelism and the Christian Life
• NBST 610 - Hermeneutics
• NBST 621 - Hebrews
• RLGN 301 - Research & Writing
• RLGN 490 - Capstone (Online)
• THEO 330 - Theology of the Family
• Mission Journals
• DMIN 851-854
• Biblical Anthropology
• Biblical Theology
• Faith at Work
• Decision Making (Made Easy)
• Philosophy of Science

Featured Resources - Start Here

Journal Articles.  These article databases are the best place to start for general research in Religion, Biblical Studies, or Theology. Try searching for the same topic on at least two of these featured databases at the start of a research project. 

While aimed at journal articles, these databases can also locate periodicals, essays (chapter within a book), books, trade publications, and book reviews. 

• Atla Religion Database with AtlaSerials Plus This link opens in a new window Full-text peer-reviewed articles on philosophy, religion, secularism, sociology of religion, spirituality, theology, and more For more information, view this brief tutorial on using ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials Plus .
• Theological Journal Library This link opens in a new window Full-text collection of major, primarily conservative, evangelical theological journals covering all aspects of theology. For more information, here is a brief tutorial on using the  Theological Journal Library database.
• Religion Database (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window Full-text peer-reviewed articles on a variety of religious groups worldwide For more information, view this brief tutorial on using Religion Database (ProQuest) .
• JSTOR This link opens in a new window Full-text articles on history, humanities, and social sciences For more information, view this brief tutorial on using JSTOR .

Theses and Dissertations

Dissertations, Theses, Conference papers, and more.  

• Scholar's Crossing: The Institutional Repository of Liberty University Scholars Crossing is Liberty University’s institutional repository of scholarly and creative works produced by students and faculty of the University.
• ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window Full-text dissertations and theses from around the world with coverage from 1743 to the present as well as citations dating back to 1637 For more information, view this brief tutorial on using ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global .
• TREN (Theological Research Exchange Network) This link opens in a new window Theological theses and dissertations as well as conference papers of several academic societies (Note: To access the full text, click on “Add this Digital e-Doc to the Liberty University subscription.” The next page will provide a “Download Now” link in order to access the requested pdf.) For more information, view this brief tutorial on using TREN (Theological Research Exchange Network) .
• Research in Ministry (RIM) This link opens in a new window Finds theological texts and summarizes them.

Databases that Support Scripture Passage Searching

Several of our religion databases allow you to search for articles on a specific Bible verse or passage.  EBSCO databases that will enable Scripture searching are  Atla, Christian Periodical Index, Old Testament Abstracts,  and  New Testament Abstracts .  But each database searches Scripture passages slightly differently.   Atla uses an "SR" prefix, while OT and NT Abstracts use a "ZP" prefix.  The  Christian Periodical Index  has Scriptures passages as subject headings but doesn't have a Scripture search feature within the database.  We have created a  Religion and Philosophy Multidisciplinary Databases Search  that searches all of these databases (and some others with religious content) simultaneously. 

Always spell out the full name of the biblical book, rather than using an abbreviation. When searching for books beginning with ordinal numbers such as first and second, etc., use the book's name followed by the ordinal number, e.g., "Corinthians, 1st" or "Corinthians, 2nd." Also note that the database does not always recognize abbreviations of the biblical books.

Different Tactics to Search Scripture on the EBSCO platform:

Option #1 : Use the book name and chapter for a specific Scripture passage you wish to search. Change the field box to SC Scripture Citation . This search tactic will typically yield results for several chapters in a book. For example, searching for Genesis 1:3 will give articles that address the whole textual unit of Genesis chapters 1-11. Note - using quote marks will not always help to reduce the results with this search option.  You often get more results by looking for an entire chapter rather than specific verses. Sometimes articles will be about only a few of the verses within a larger passage. You generally will have to skim the results because there may be some irrelevant titles.

Option #2: Use the Scriptures button at the very top. Refine the search using the expanders on the left. You only need to select the beginning verse of a textual unit. Note that the results page will then have <SR "passage"> in the search field, signifying the Scripture range. This tactic also yields results that are more inclusive and may address larger textual units or additional chapters. Option #2 does help when searching in biblical books with multiple volumes (e.g., Kings, Chronicles, Epistles of John).

Option #3: Use the More button , also at the very top. Now, select Indexes . And then use the dropdown menu for Browse and Index and select Bible Citation . Enter the passage in the Browse By field. Spell out the entire book name; however, no quotes are needed. Click the boxes on the left for all passage that apply. And now click the Search button back up top. Notice the results page has a <ZP "passage"> in the search field, signifying an Exact Passage search. This search option also uses the above model for ordinal names: e.g., <Kings, 1st 3:16>.

If there are still too many results, add a specific phrase or concept connected with the passage, such as "woman caught in adultery," or "Goliath," or "prodigal son." Add topics to a field box and change the limiter in front of the second box from the default "AND" to "OR" and include that descriptive phrase to expand your search while still including the passage of interest.

Click here to search the combined Religion and Philosophy databases all at once:  Ebscohost Religion, Philosophy, and Multidisciplinary Journal Search

• Christian Periodical Index This link opens in a new window Full-text peer-reviewed articles covering evangelical perspectives, religion, philosophy, history, and education from the mid-1970s to the present For more information, view this brief tutorial on using this EBSCO database .
• Old Testament Abstracts This link opens in a new window Peer-reviewed article abstracts on a variety of topics in Old Testament studies
• New Testament Abstracts This link opens in a new window Peer-reviewed article abstracts on a variety of topics in New Testament studies (Updated regularly)

Additional Religion Resources

Here are some additional resources and databases. These tend to have a narrower focus or a specific target area of study. Some of these databases include e-books, which can still be found on the main library book catalog search.  

• Eleutheria Direct link to the John W. Rawlings School of Divinity Academic Journal (also searchable on ATLA above)
• Faith and the Academy From the LU Center for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement
• Twentieth Century Religious Thought: Christianity This link opens in a new window Primary sources from Christian authors from the early 1900s until the turn of the 21st century For more information, view this brief tutorial on using Twentieth Century Religious Thought: Christianity .
• Digital Karl Barth Library This link opens in a new window Definitive collection of Barth’s works in German, including sermons, letters, lectures, conversations, and academic writings as well as a full-text English translation of Barth’s The Church Dogmatics and other works
• Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts This link opens in a new window Full-text writings from Protestant leaders such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and more
• Ministry Matters This link opens in a new window Collection of commentaries, Bible dictionaries, and other reference works for preparing sermons and lessons
• RightNow Media This link opens in a new window Videos of Bible studies and other Christian media PLEASE NOTE: First-time users will need to select the link above to create an account to access this resource. Click Here if you have an existing account
• Religious and Theological Abstracts This link opens in a new window Article abstracts for theology and religion
• Southern Baptist Periodical Index This link opens in a new window Articles from Southern Baptist Convention-related agencies on theology, Baptist history, worship, religious education, Baptist education, and more (Updated annually)
• Theology & Religion Online This link opens in a new window Full-text articles, commentaries, and dictionaries on a variety of topics in theology

Open Access - Religion and Bible Study

• Websites (various resources)
• Bible Study (versions, tools)
• Primary Texts & Classics
• Theologians
• Digital Theological Library - Open Access Version The open access version of the larger Digital Theological Library. Includes journals, books, dissertations, and other materials.
• Hathi Trust Digital Library
• Princeton Library Open Access A list of open access sites provided by the Wright Library at Princeton Theological Seminary.
• Theology on the Web Includes material in the following areas: Biblical Archaeology, Biblical Studies, Early Church History, Medieval Church History, Missiology, Reformation Church History, Theological Studies

The following websites offer helpful Bible study tools for personal and devotion use, and even some helps with the original languages. 

However, when writing papers for LU research projects, it is best use make full use of the many exegetical and academic commentaries that are available through the JFL online catalog. Not every resource on these Open Access pages will fulfill the scholarly requirements for course assignments, even if they are beneficial for individual growth and other ministries. 

• Bible Gateway Bible passage lookup and word search -- available in a wide variety of versions and languages.
• Bible Hub Parallel translations, lessons, commentaries and other resources from the Online Parallel Bible Project. Check under the Bible menu for Cross References.
• Blue Letter Bible
• Liberty University Bible Resource Center
• MARBLE An online Hebrew Semantic Dictionary provided by the United Bible Societies.
• Net Bible Provided through OpenBible, Net Bible offers up-to-date translation and Greek helps.
• Step Bible Managed by publisher Tyndale House, the site provides access to study tools such as Bible translations and commentaries.
• StudyLight An online study tool that includes free access to Bible study and language tools, historical writings, and a variety of helpful resources for ministers and teachers.
• BiblIndex A special database to search for scriptural citations within the patristic writings and early Christian literature.
• Christian Classics Ethereal Library Classic Christian books in electronic format.
• Chapel Library Full text access to several public domain titles, Puritan titles, and classic Ch Living books.
• Fordham University History Sourcebook Online texts of many early and medieval Christian writings, plus much more.
• Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University Includes the Yale University Press' critical edition of the works of Jonathan Edwards published in a digital format. These works are searchable by keyword.
• Post-Reformation Digital Libary The Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL) is a select database of digital books relating to the development of theology and philosophy during the Reformation and Post-Reformation/Early Modern Era (late 15th-18th c.). Late medieval and patristic works printed and referenced in the early modern era are also included. The PRDL is a project of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research.

Moving Beyond the Databases

Can't find a book through the JFL? Try these sites for potential digital versions.

• Internet Archive Archive does require creating a personal account (for free), but it offers a number of e-books that are not readily available through the online databases.
• Log College Press (Dead Presbyterians Society)
• Digital Public Library of America

Interlibrary Loans

Most journal articles and single chapters from print books (essays) can be scanned and emailed to students, both residential and online.

• Interlibrary Loans This link takes you to the ILL log-in page. From here, you can request books, journal articles, essays, and more items from other libraries across the country.

Print books that are already in the JFL collection can be requested by online students and mailed to them. Requests for ILL print books that are not already in the JFL collection must be picked up at the library; these are not mailed out.

Tips for ATLA (EBSCO) Searches

Expand the search by:

• Using OR with multiple search terms.
• Try Nesting with parentheses. E.g., (cat OR dog) AND pet
• Click the Search within Full Text option.
• Click the Apply Related Words option.
• Use the  Equivalent Subjects suggestions when provided in the field boxes.
• The system defaults to finding terms within 5 other words of each other. Add N# or W# between two field terms. For example, using N7 searches any order, within 7 other words. Using W8 searches that particular order, within 8 other words of each other. Nesting applies here too.
• Follow the Subjects links within the article. Likewise, try the Thesaurus button at the top for alternative search terms.
• Use a Wildcard . The * adds any number of l etters  inside or at the end of a word. It can also search for whole words inside a phrase. The # can be inserted where an alternative spelling might happen. And the ? can be used for a single letter wildcard (but not at the end).    
• Switch to the  Religion, Philosophy, Multidisciplinary   search, which includes ATLA plus several other R&P databases.
• Make sure the Peer Reviewed button is turned off, and search for Publication Type: Essay . Track down the originating book and examine the other chapters included. 

Narrow down the search by:

• Use just one database; turn off equivalent subjects.
• Use  AND  with several search terms. Add a new search term/row.
• Limit the search Field to just title or subject.
• Use  NOT to exclude terms.
• Use Quote Marks  for phrases & word order. (note: the system will ignore some articles and prepositions)
• Click the Peer Reviewed  limiter.
• Narrow the Date  of publication.
• Limit the  Publication Type (article, essay, review).
• Limit the Language . 
• Limit by Subject (and the show more feature).

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